EmoGest: Investigating the Impact of Emotions on Spontaneous Co-speech Gestures

Spontaneous co-speech gestures are an integral part of human communicative behavior. Little is known, however, about how they reflect a speaker's emotional state. In this paper, we describe the setup of a novel body movement database. 32 participants were primed with emotions (happy, sad, neutral) by listening to selected music pieces and, subsequently, fulfilled a gesture-eliciting task. We present our methodology of evaluating the effects of emotion priming with standardized questionnaires, and via automatic emotion recognition of the speech signal. First results suggest that emotional priming was successful, thus, paving the way for further analyses comparing the gestural behavior across the three experimental conditions.